Barcelona

Expedia put me in a hotel called GBH 4, so new that the cab
driver denied its existance. Showed him the reservation. When we got to
the address, the hotel wasn't there. He freaked. (It's set way
back from the road.) Modernist cubist place, very nice, four blocks walk
through a cemetary to the beach. This is my first glimpse of the
Mediterranean. I've now seen 85.7% of the seven seas.

There are a few tables-under-a-tent seafood
restaurants along the beach. Somehow didn't get a pic of the
restaurants; here's dinner.

I allocated way to little time to Barcelona (3 days). I'd
thought it would be a bunch of condos like Miami Beach, and wouldn't
have gone there at all but for Gaudi. Among the things I missed: the
largest electronic music festival in Europe (by 1 day); the Russian
National Ballet performing Swan Lake; the Picasso museum; the tram that
goes from a mountaintop over the bay; and the naval museum (shown).

I bought this guy's CD because his songs only
use words that I know. Maybe he dropped out after the
third grade. He also sang Blowin in the Wind in Spanish,
which I found passing strange. Good thing it wasn't in
Catalan. People are bilingual in Catalan and Spanish. In
some cases it's a matter of spelling (Horchata ->
Orxata). In other cases it's radical (con -> amb). Got
the impression that 25% of the words came from medieval
French. It's pronounced in a blur like English rather
than the sewing-machine taka-taka-taka of Spanish.
Airport signs are trilingual.

About 1/3 of the traffic is bikes. Many of the side streets are
dedicated to bike parking. Maybe it's green, but I never did get used to
seeing suits on mopeds. Or maybe it's seeing suits being green. (I have
enough of the 60s left in me that wearing a suit makes you an automatic
asshole.)

View from my hotel room. Could that
be...could that possibly be the Telstra tower? Yes, actually. The
original may be in Canberra, but Barcelona also has a telephone relay
tower with space-needlish observation desks. Another thing I
didn't make it to. There's enough left to see that I'm thinking of
making next year's international trip to Malaga (beach, Picasso's
hometown) with daytrips to Seville and Gibralter, then up to Barcelona,
then on to Rome.

Recommended: a charming movie about Barcelona
called Tapas. In the opening scene we see Granny tottering along the
street. Aw, what a cute little dog in that car! So she smashes the
window and lets him out. The whole movie's like that. In the kitchen of
a tapas joint, we see the owner Gilberto yelling at his wife "We're out
of octopus! We're out of milk!" She's rolling her eyes and heads out.
Cut to her leaving their apartment with a wheelie, never to reappear
the rest of the movie. Back to the front of the restaurant where we see
Granny dealing coke under the table. The owner spends the rest of the
movie trying to cover for his wife's absence--he hires a Chinese martial
artist to work in the back and answer to Rosalita when he bellows. We see him in a bar confiding to a
woman that he'd like to say she's gone, but doesn't want to lose face.
"I'm a whore, Gilberto", she points out. "You're asking a whore about
honor." I could keep going...you get the idea. Its the character-driven
quirky fluff that the French do so well.

Tapas along the harbor: seriously overate at this place.
The waiter had immigrated from Colombia and learned a new
language--Catalan. When he found out I spoke
Spanish he kept giving me little extras to try. He asked if pretty much
everyone in the US spoke Spanish these days. He was off by a generation.

Antoni Gaudi (1952-1926)
spent 40 years on La Sagrada Familia. He figured God was in no
hurry. It wasn't finished at his death. The city is now
finishing it off, in a style that's much more conventional than
Gaudi's own. Like most Spanish architecture, this defies
photography because it's on such a large scale. You can shoot
bits and pieces, but it would take VR to give the whole. In
fact, it was so large and various that it was hard to take it
all in while walking around it.